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who occupied many of the RAF’s cockpits: “They have saved this country1105; they have the right to rule it.” Labour’s Aneurin Bevan told one of his many election audiences, “We have been the dreamers1106, we have been the sufferers, now we are the builders.” Churchill was applauded everywhere he went during his June 1945 election tours, and public admiration for him was very real. But with the wisdom sometimes displayed by democracies, few people allowed this to influence their votes. Churchill’s election broadcasts were harshly combative. He deployed against the threat of socialism all the impassioned verbiage which he had mobilised for so long against the nation’s enemies. Even many supporters thought his tirades ill-judged, and there were moments when he himself seemed to agree.

Clementine wrote to her daughter Mary on June 20: “Papa broadcasts tonight. He is very low, poor Darling. He thinks he has lost his ‘touch’ and he grieves about it.” Londoner Jennifer McIntosh wrote to her sister in California on July 4: “One of the most extraordinary things1107 has been the terrific slump in the Churchill prestige … I wish you could have heard his election broadcasts—they were deplorable, the last one pitifully cheap.” Likewise, Oliver Harvey at the Foreign Office perceived Churchill as conducting “a jingo election which is terrifying1108 in its inappropriateness.” Churchill was much more a social conservative than he was a political Conservative. He lacked real sympathy for or interest in the party which he nominally led at the hustings. He anticipated that the election outcome would represent a vote of confidence in his own war leadership, rather than a verdict on the Tories’ fitness to rule.

But the war was almost ended. While the rival candidates campaigned, most of the complexities of occupying Germany and sustaining the struggle against Japan were addressed without interventions from the prime minister. Addicted to tidings from battlefields, he often stumped into the secretaries’ room at Downing Street to demand: “Any news come in?” Told, perhaps for the sixth time in a day, that there was none, he said irritably: “I won’t have it … I must have1109 more regular reports. It’s your business to keep me informed.” Yet opportunities were now few to order the movements of armies, fleets or air forces. He directed Alexander to act vigorously to expel Tito’s partisans from Trieste and northeastern Italy, to which they laid claim. When the C-in-C warned that British troops were much less enthusiastic about fighting Yugoslavs than Germans, Churchill dismissed his fears—and ordered a display of force. Faced with this, the Yugoslavs withdrew behind the Izonzo River. The prime minister again used British troops to force the French to withdraw from Syria, which was handed over to an indigenous Arab government. France occupied an area of northwestern Italy which it claimed. Here, too, Churchill acted ruthlessly and successfully, insisting upon removal of de Gaulle’s forces.

In Southeast Asia, Slim’s Fourteenth Army was mopping up the last of the Japanese in Burma, and preparing for an amphibious assault on Malaya, scheduled for September. Captain Pim diligently moved the relevant pins and arrows on the walls of the Map Room at Downing Street, but the prime minister’s heart was never deeply engaged. He remained preoccupied with the fate of Europe, and with urging upon the new U.S. president the need to adopt firm policies towards the Russians.

On May 18, the Churchills entertained to lunch at Downing Street the Russian ambassador, Fyodor Gusev. When Clementine and other guests left the table, the prime minister unburdened himself to the Soviet emissary. It seems worth relating at length Gusev’s account of the meeting, as evidence both of Churchill’s sentiments and of the manner in which these were reported to Moscow. The prime minister began by describing the importance he attached to a new summit meeting at which “either we shall achieve an agreement on future cooperation between our three nations, or the Anglo-American community